1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method for distributing software and, more particularly, to a method for distributing software based on software protection devices.
2. State of the Art
The rapid development of software industry has greatly improved social productivity in recent years, but the accompanying software piracy technologies become the biggest obstacle for the industry. Currently, hardware based software protection is a leading technology to provide highly secured software protection. However, because the software protection devices are concrete and there are disadvantages in the current software distribution methods, the development of the software protection technology using software protection devices is hampered.
Currently, the software and the upgrade programs based on software protection devices are distributed in the following way: a) first the software developer purchases software protection devices and software development kits or tools; b) then the software developer uses the software development kits or tools to program on the software protection devices, so that the protected software cannot work without the software protection devices; c) finally the software developer delivers the protected software together with the software protection device to each end user.
There are several disadvantages in this distribution mode: 1) the software developer has to pay for the cost of software protection devices on top of the cost of developing the software; 2) unlike the software, the software protection devices cannot be directly delivered via the Internet, which makes the selling channel more complex; 3) One software protection device can match only one kind of software, the users may end up having many software protection devices, which may result in inconvenience of use and waste of resources.